Four Centuries of Southern Indians

Description

The Indians of the Southeast had the most highly centralized and complex social structure of all the aboriginal peoples in the continental United States. Yet they have remained relatively unknown to most scholars and laypeople, in part because of a lack of collaboration between historians and anthropologists. In these nine essays, historians and anthropologists add to a fuller understanding of the southern Indians. The essays span four hundred years, beginning with French and Spanish relations with the Timucuan Indians in northern Florida in the sixteenth century and ending with the modern Cherokees transported to Oklahoma. The interim topics include the social structure of the Tuscaroras of North Carolina in the eighteenth century, the role southern Indians played in the American Revolution, the removal of the southern Indians to the Indian Territory, and Cherokee beliefs about sorcery and witchcraft.